London Calling: Happy Birthday, Norman Parkinson

In her Tuesday column about all things stylish and British, Sarah Mower celebrates the dynamic, free-spirited work of the legendary fashion photographer.It’s the centenary of the birthday of the great, attenuated British photographer Norman Parkinson (1913–1990), who stood six foot five inches in his stocking feet and who, with his astonishing eye for elegance, humanity, and humor captured the sort of photographs that could make electricity jolt up your arms as you turned the pages of Vogue. Actually, looking at the pictures now surfacing in the cornucopia of Parkinson-related events starting this week in anticipation of his centennial—his birthday was April 21—I’m finding myself overcome with emotion: It dawned on me only yesterday that it was the experience of seeing a Parkinson photograph as a child that changed my life. I opened a copy of my aunt’s British Vogue and saw a picture of a model sitting dreamily in a reed boat on a river in Ethiopia and fell headfirst in love with fashion forever. I might have been too young to read a caption, to realize that the dress was by Ossie Clark, that the model was Maudie James, or understand who, exactly, took the photo, but that was me—gone. It was 1969.

It took decades to realize that picture was styled by Grace Coddington when she was a fashion editor at British Vogue. Norman Parkinson had already played a life-changing role in Grace’s life. He was the first photographer to hire her as a model, and she went on to shoot with him as an editor on many a fantastic jaunt. In fact, Grace and Parks (as almost everyone came to know him) shot unforgettable travelogues for British Vogue for years, going places fashion never went in the late sixties and seventies. Besides Ethiopia and Barbados (where the duo perched the model Apollonia atop a fake Roman column), there was the Soviet Union, then a verboten Communist territory behind the Iron Curtain. They took Jerry Hall and put her on a plinth in the sea in a red bathing suit, swim cap and heels.

Perhaps they didn’t quite understand the satirical English laughter in this image in which Hall seems to impersonate the People’s Party statue to health and athleticism. I’ve only just learned from the Norman Parkinson archive, from which you can buy prints like these, that the lettering on the plinth (it was polystyrene) reads “Jerry Hall VOGUE 1975.”

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Photo: Chuck Zuretti

I think you can see something of the relationship between Parks and Grace in this self-portrait in which he appears to be taking garden shears to someone’s red hair. It’s a model, not Grace, but who else could he have meant? More of the story of their creative jollity is told by Grace in a BBC4 ARENA documentary, AKA: Norman Parkinson, which will be shown on British television TV on April 21. Here’s a taster.

Perhaps even more magical is Parkinson’s beautiful, color-saturated work in which he captured the elegance of mid-century modern fashion as it was happening.

Although he dutifully delineated the shape of every dress and coat, there was always the feeling that the subjects of Parkinson’s pictures, with their cocked eyebrows, private smiles, and hoity-toity amused profiles were living, breathing women. Carmen Dell’Orefice describes his exceptional aesthetic in the arena documentary that explains to me why there is such pleasure in merely laying eyes on photographs like this one, which radiates the pure essence of spring, shot for American Vogue in 1952.

For me, however, it was almost like being hit in the solar plexus to see, for the first time, the photos Parkinson shot in Bath, England, in 1948. I come from Bath, and these pictures are being shown starting next weekend in an exhibition curated by Roland Mouret for the Bath in Fashion festival there. The pictures were shot as part of a spring hat story for British Vogue.

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Photo: Norman Parkinson, A Spring Hat and the City of Bath series, British Vogue, February 1948, Copyright Norman Parkinson Ltd/Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive

It was a soot-blackened city in those days, but I recognize all the places. In this image, the little open-air Cross Bath is on the left—it’s where I learned to swim in the hot spring waters at the age of four.

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Photo: Norman Parkinson, A Spring Hat and the City of Bath series, British Vogue, February 1948, Copyright Norman Parkinson Ltd/Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive

These ladies are posing on the steps leading up to the Georgian terraces known as the Paragon. In one of those houses was a children’s dancing school where my main accomplishment was learning how to curtsy. Not something I ever counted as an achievement, but it did come in handy when I met the Queen last year. It’s funny how life turns out, and where adventures in fashion—and dreaming about fashion—can take us, isn’t it?

“Mouvements de Femmes by Norman Parkinson,” curated by Roland Mouret for Bath in Fashion 2013, will be on view at the Octagon in Milsom Place, Bath from April 13–May 12; bathinfashion.co.uk

In honor of the photographer, the Norman Parkinson Archive is releasing a special centenary edition photographic print. There are 100 prints in the edition and each photograph is marked on the reverse with the Archive centenary stamp; from $500 each; for information: info@normanparkinson.com